petty criminals of this class. “These, gentlemen,” he said, “are permits to inspect the jail; go some day and see the place to which you send criminals.” A very wise and benevolent innovation, but we still await the judge who will send the jury to inspect the homes in which these men conceive crime.
About 400,000 citizens of the greatest city in the world belong to this class. If 400,000 do not constitute a sufficiently important problem, let us see the homes of the next category. These are the irregularly employed and badly paid, though not the worst paid, workers: costers, labourers, dockers, etc. There are about a million of them in London alone. They know quite well what hunger is: for weeks together, sometimes, the wage does not suffice to buy that minimum quantity of nitrogen and carbon which men of science have declared to be necessary, and the money is ill expended. They know what cold is, for many a hard spell of winter finds them in want. They have two or three rooms to each family, but, as a rule, not much of that “Christian reticence” on which our clergy congratulate us.
To the great majority of these million and a half of London’s poor, sexual pleasure is the one cheap luxury; and we encourage them to breed industriously. My wife, with other ladies and gentlemen, addresses them on the subject from the tail of a cart in South London, and teaches the heavy-burdened mothers how to avoid having so many children; and the leader of this little group was
